Liberating the Curator / Liberating the Museum

The rise of Curatorial Studies as an academic discipline since the late 1980s saw a gradual side-lining of Museum Studies, which were often posited as too technically minded and institutionally bound to contain the most speculative and experimental aspects of curatorial practice. However, this took place just as the more politicised New Museology, which had been given fuel by liberationist movements in Latin America a decade earlier, began to make its mark into the English-speaking world. This paper will retrace that history and ask what potential might still be found in those earlier attempts to rethink the European model of the museum in which the curator, far from emerging as a new author, was to serve as a vanishing mediator.